Flash on iPad, iPod, iPhone Thoughts

[Lord MJ]

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I'm starting to dislike Steve Jobs. Sure many of his criticisms of flash are valid, but it's one thing to say that Flash is slow and that Adobe is slow in making flash compatible with Mac. It's quite another to ban flash from the iphone. It's like he's saying that he's doing us a favor or something, that it's good for us.

I would like to see a situation where Microsoft decided to get that controlling about apps that run on Windows. That applications on windows can only be developed in Microsoft approved platforms. Saying something like Java is buggy and slow, so we are banning Java apps from running on Windows.

I'm not a flash developer, and I'm not exactly buying the whole anti-trust arguments being thrown out, but I still think this is a dickish move on Apple's part.

[Stark]

Flash sucks shit and people should stop using it. I don't care that my phone can't use it.

In a perfect world everyone would have switched, the way they switched to h264 for everything instead of hackish avi nonsense or RMP or whatev; but the massive preponderance of flash content that isn't going away is a big problem. If every browser banned flash, maybe the world woudl be a better place.

[General Zod]

I don't see it as a big loss as long as other technologies can supplement or replace flash. If it really bugs you that much, don't buy Apple?

[Dragon Angel]

Aside from playing the odd Flash game, or going to video sites like Hulu and YouTube, I really don't use Flash a terrible lot...even on my normal computers. I hardly even see Flash on regular sites that use it to "enhance" themselves in some way, as most of the time I have NoScript enabled for those sites, and I only explicitly allow Flash to execute on special sites that do require it.

[Lord MJ]

My anger at Apple's lockdown is more as a developer than as a user. I don't currently develop for the iPhone and I don't see it as an attractive platform because of all of Apple's restrictions. On top of that Steve Jobs attempt to say "our policies are a good thing" to get buy in from the sheep.

But the IPhone is becoming more popular and soon having iPhone interface will be a requirement for anyone developing web based platforms.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Yeah why could a popular device with standardized hardware be attractive to develop for? Certainly nobody develops for consoles.

[atg]

Yeah why could a popular device with standardized hardware be attractive to develop for? Certainly nobody develops for consoles.

Console makers don't arbitrarily or artificially limit what languages you can use to program for the platform.

[Stark]

I guess that's why there's so many flash... oh wait, flash sucks shit!

I don't believe there's any advantage to flash on mobile devices beyond portability; something iPhone developers clearly have no problem with (given the variety of cross platform applications). So aside from laziness or habit, who cares?

[atg]

Apart from youtube, which has a seperate app to handle it, the only flash-based item I've wanted to access on my iPhone is Zero Punctuation, so it doesn't really affect me as a user per se.

I can see where the developers are coming from though - who would really want to redevelope their application/website so that iPhone users can access it just because Steve Jobs wants to continue being a tool appear technologically avante garde? HTML5 FTW!!!!

[Stark]

You mean develop an applicaiton for the largest, most profitable market? I think you're looking at this backwards. iPhone is often the primary market and everything ELSE is the port. How do you think devs feel about touch control? Oh right, they don't care because it's huge profitable and growing market.

Sorry, flash needs to die, and if nerds need to be furious about it for it to happen, so be it. In ten years we'll be thankful it happened.

Fucking flash. Ugh.

[Ryan Thunder]

While I think Steve's being a total toolbox and a control freak, I do believe that getting rid of flash wasn't a bad thing, for most of the reasons he listed.

It'll be interesting to see how well HTML5 handles the sort of thing Flash was used for, though.

[atg]

You mean develop an applicaiton for the largest, most profitable market? I think you're looking at this backwards. iPhone is often the primary market and everything ELSE is the port. How do you think devs feel about touch control? Oh right, they don't care because it's huge profitable and growing market.

OK I'm thinking of Flash in terms of websites, not apps on the phone itself. Seeing as flash based website were out years before the iPhone then the iPhone would be the "port". I am agreed on the apps tho, however would like the language requirements relaxed (IIRC its currently C, C++, Obj C only).

Why not allow Flash to run in safari to allow those websites to retain full functionality while the industry looks at moving to HTML5 rather than being a dick and demanding everyone move when Apple decrees that it is the chosen time?

[Stark]

Yeah, the website thing is the only real 'issue' with this - and the huge amount of existing content means nobody is going to convert overnight (as they do with media formats etc). I guess I'm in the minority in that the only broken flash I see on websites is embedded movies I wouldn't watch anyway, but I think pressure like this from an industry giant is a net positive to push for change. It was my understanding that other methods allowed hte same or similar functionality on websites for years, but that flash was so prevalent (both content and skilled developers) that nobody changed.

[Sarevok]

Soo how do you guys watch various internet video sites on teh iphone ?

[Stark]

Wow, way to read the thread there, champ.

[atg]

Soo how do you guys watch various internet video sites on teh iphone ?

You don't. Except for YouTube which has a specific app that doesn't use Flash for the video.

[Resinence]

Hurr hurr you guyz can't watch flash video on the iphone.

Oh wait flash is just the player, the video is in a video codec, the iphone can play video files.

Oh wait again there are sites to get the download link for the video file just for iphones.

OMGZ IPHONE SUCKS YOU CAN'T WATCH VIDEO I AM SO SMRT. Everyone should buy an androidz with 35829 features they will never use and a physical keyboard because thats what nerds are familiar with.

Also as a web developer, fuck flash.

[Sarevok]

So I take it other than a youtube specific app iphone users are helpless if they stumble across any site offering flash video or content ?

What a piece of shit.

[Stark]

It's like Sarevok is reading a whole different thread to the rest of us.

[Lagmonster]

Okay, first of all, WHY is flash bad? Just saying it 'sucks shit' doesn't constitute a reasonable argument to those of us who are merely end users enjoying a product. Clearly it's popular, but why is it bad?

Second of all, cut the smarmy bullshit. Especially you, Resinence. Any more of that semi-literate shit and I'll start dumping posts to the barrel on principle.

[Stark]

It's clunky, old, poorly supported, inefficient... what more do you want? It's popular due to momentum; people learn it because it's widespread and continue using it, since there's no real pressure to change.

[Sarevok]

It's clunky, old, poorly supported, inefficient... what more do you want? It's popular due to momentum; people learn it because it's widespread and continue using it, since there's no real pressure to change.

So if iphone does not support something it means that it is automatically bad. Even though the rest of the world uses it. Whether flash is good, bad or evil is your personal point of view, What matters is the fact that over past decade flash has become dominant over the web. In applications such as video streaming and web based games Flash is something of a defacto standard. Every major web browser and operating system supports flash. Dropping flash support just indicates technological deficiency not progress.

[Norade]

As much as I agree that flash is a clunky outdated hackjob, I'd argue that most of what we use to program is. Certainly thee is massive room to improve on html but you don't see anybody calling for it to be replaced with a better language, at least not on this scale. Besides, how do we know html5 will fix all of our issues?

[Xon]

Okay, first of all, WHY is flash bad? Just saying it 'sucks shit' doesn't constitute a reasonable argument to those of us who are merely end users enjoying a product.

It is horribly inefficient at video decoding and will utterly rape the CPU for any animated images. This results in that +10 hour battery life for the iphone turning into less than an hour or 2 because the CPU is getting hammered.

Oh, Adobe products (flash, acrobat reader, etc) are buggy peices of shit with more security vulnerabilities and poor patching cycle than Win98

[Resinence]

Also it's a pure binary format, there is a reason everyone on the web is drilled with "DO NOT USE FLASH FOR NAVIGATION", search engines cannot index flash links, they cannot open binary files, even google only goes as far as very limited RGB colour tests for image files, tineye is the most advanced I've seen for searching binary formats on the web and it's just image files. As already stated it's slow and clunky, a browser plugin that somehow survived past the netscape days purely on it's popularity. Pretty much the only reason anyone who knows how shit it is uses it is because luddites refuse to or cannot because of corporate apps upgrade from IE6, which has no canvas support. I will literally throw a party when flash finally dies and is replaced by the canvas element in html5 in like 3 years.

For video it's just another wrapper around the video file that frankly is bloat, if only mozilla would stop holding back 264 for the html5 video tag... can't say I blame them though.

For audio same thing just another wrapper, every pc and even most non pc devices have mp3 codec support now days.

Oh and the actual flash cs4/5 app still sucks and crashes on mac os x. So much for "all platforms are equal".